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RIBA Awards 2011: Introduction

There are 89 British winners this year, four less than 2010, split among 80 firms - Hopkins, with four winners, leads the pack, although three Scottish firms, Page\Park, Richard Murphy and Sutherland Hussey each bagged two

Last year we introduced a new way of looking at the RIBA Awards, by typology rather than region, an approach that more readily draws out the emerging trends in British architecture. Aesthetic, form, programme and sustainability are more easily identifiable this way than listing winners by region.

Among the winners are 17 houses but just seven housing developments; 16 public buildings compared with only five devoted to healthcare, with three of these procured privately. There is an almost even split between work and leisure, with nine workplace winners and eight successful leisure schemes (which also contain the biggest and smallest of this year’s winners: Sixteen*(makers’) forest shelter cost just £60,000 and Jean Nouvel and Sidell Gibson’s £163 million One New Change).

The quality of school buildings is high, though it is doubtful the typology will match the success of 2010 and generate two Stirling contenders, even if the overall standard of the 11 winners is probably higher. Campus architecture is this year’s surprise however – it has yielded 16 winning designs.

One general trend is the increasing quality of retrofit projects. There is a sense that the question of re-use and adaptation is coming into its own, perhaps most clearly among the workplace winners.

This year we’ve added the cost per square metre to each of the entries. It’s a basic calculation: project cost divided by internal area. Furthermore, we have highlighted projects published in the AJ or the AJ Buildings Library. The eight European winners, eligible for the Stirling Prize, are also listed.

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The Architects' Journal is the voice of architecture in Britain. We sit at the heart of the debate about British architecture and British cities, and form opinions across the whole construction industry on design-related matters